The Further Adventures Of GM Gabriel

Apropos to our discussion on Wednesday, the ESRB took up the dilapidated tools of their craft and began truly manifesting their birthright: they changed the rating of GTA: San Andreas to Adults Only, where (it could be argued) it belonged from the beginning. Publisher Take Two’s stock took a hit, and it’s assumed that this change will seriously impact sales, but I don’t know that we have good data on how a marquee franchise like GTA would be affected such a thing. It’s purportedly the “kiss of death,” which probably means Wal-Mart won’t carry it or some such. Maybe that’s really important in some places. I don’t even have one here. Best Buy, Gamestop, and EB are all within two blocks of one another, and if I stand directly in the center of those three points I feel a surge of energy that physically hoists me into the air.

In other news that we’ve discussed recently, Sony is starting to get the impression that the base functionality of the PSP needs to be a bit more robust if it wants to compete for time with the Internet Metamind. They’re on the right track with the 2.0 update, as far as I’m concerned: hit up this video to check out the elegant web browser and downloadable videos. That’s certainly something I’m interested in, greater convergence, but Job One (as it is called) is improved video functionality. That’s coming too, or at any rate, it might - the IGN headline says “The same codec that makes UMD Video so hot, now available to you,” but in the second paragraph the author expresses doubts over whether or not users will be able to create the files. In the third paragraph, “Nix” begins to question common objects, launching into a devastating critique of zippers that certainly I found persuasive. I though that I remembered securing a coat or jeans with these contrivances, but I now believe - as Nix does - that such “wisps of memory” are merely the “exhaust produced by consciousness, as the mind burns to nothing.”

At any rate, for the feature to be worthwhile, which is to say, for it to make a reasonable person cripple their machine for homebrew, by which I mean ROMS, they need to understand that we need unfettered access to multimedia. That’s all I was trying to say.